works of wanderlust

of a million little leaves.
The autumn weather and colours brought me on a long wandering walk this past weekend through the rolling single-track trails of our local river valley. Fifteen minutes of brisk strolling in the direction of the parklike preserve finds multiple opportunities to step into a wilderness that changes with the season.

For a few days, literally only days, each year the trail is a glorious canopy of oranges and yellows, and on rare days it is all set upon an upwards sky that acts as a azure blue backdrop to the autumn changing of the leaves from life into litter.

I strolled with the dog and paused every few steps as a new splendour tempted my phone camera as a reference that pleaded to be put down on paper in vibrant watercolours.

persistence and time

While I cherish the idea of quickly sketching a few lines onto a page and leaving behind a breezy, airy form that captures the imagination, I have also known since my early art days that not every work will come so easily. Eagerness to stamp a date and a signature on the bottom of a piece and flip the page to the next project is often overwhelming for me, so occasionally finding myself with a challenge that requires literal days of iterative work forces me to think long term, in layers, and across the trudge-like march towards something that will always seemingly benefit from a few more perfectly placed spot of colour.

Painting leaves turned out to be a massive challenge.

One at a time, I have drawn and coloured many of them in the past days and months.

But thousands. Millions, maybe, like an abstraction of light and colour and life and warmth and magic all at once? Capturing that with my amature skills was almost an impossible task.

I will admit, as I put down the first couple layers of paint and left them to dry I had a sinking feeling in my heart that I’d be either tearing the page from my art book or leaving it there as some kind of reminder-like testament to an ego-driven error.

I went to sleep that first night, a Saturday, a little humbled by the paint’s ability to break me so thoroughly.

Sunday morning I woke up and in my morning stupor dabbled a bit more into the piece. The drops of spattered colour had the right hues and shapes as they had fully dried and there was nothing to lose by adding a few more of them. Rather, I resumed my droplet art with some deeper reds and greenish yellow to act as a contrasting underlayer.

By Sunday night, I was feeling a bit better… but still had a vague sense of… meh.

Monday, more paint was added. And yet by Tuesday I had decided to be bold and deepen the contrast of the tree branches which were starting to fade into the background blurs of yellow and pinks and reds and greens.

There wasn’t really a moment when it popped, but at some point I started to feel the persistent meddling in the finality of this piece had begun to pay off, transforming the random shapes into something closer to what I held in my mind’s eye, that reference image captured in my memory as I stood on a river valley trail gazing up into the orange canopy of leaves overhead.

It just stuck, somehow. Worked. Though I couldn’t explain why.

It was still imperfect, yes, but definitely not more litter for the autumn trash heap.
October 5, 2022
of nature studies and pinecones.
Autumn arrived like an express train, passing between the trees with a gust of chilly wind and leaving behind a noticeable change in the mood. The leaves changed colour with its arrival, folding from a mature, ripe green hue to patterns of orange and red and yellow and brown.

These are colours to which I have learned this year to give new names: ochre, umber, rust, and olive.

While I spent hours of my weekend dabbling in the autumn colours of my watercolour paint sets, looking to match warm hues with the visuals I held in my mind and on the photo roll of my phone after a meandering walk through the nearby river valley, I found a better success in the simplicity of the lingering remains of summer.

Between snapping epic photos of billowing autumn leaves patched against azure skies, I’d also gathered a small collection of photos of oblivious little pinecones still hanging (or recently fallen) from the boughs of the various evergreens.

studies and collections

Repetition is the king of practice, though painting the same thing over and over again could quickly become tedious. The notion of a study unlocks the frustration of repetition from the benefits, at least I think so. A study as I've defined it, is the tackling of a set of similar subjects with a common theme, similar characteristics or some other factor in common. For example, I took a stroll through the local park and snapped a half dozen photos of various pinecones. Some were dangling from branches while some were on the ground. Some were young and green while others were dried up and cracked open. Four of those photos became the basis for my study, creating four individual paintings with four similar styles. Yet in the spirit of repetition, I mixed one set of paint, used one spread of paper, and painted each in quick succession taking the micro-lessons learned from each go inform the next.

Groups of things intrigue me, because whether it is leaves or rocks or pinecones, the mind plays a trick on us that makes us create a kind of symbolic idealism for them in our head. It is a default mental state that almost any who do art need to overcome at some point: not painting or drawing what we think we see, but actually painting or drawing what we do see.

Take a pinecone for example. In my mind I have an idealized image of a pinecone. It’s shape, colour, and texture are all locked in as a mental symbol of a pinecone.

I didn’t draw that symbol. Rather I drew four pictures of the pinecones I found in my park on my walk, not a one of them really even matching the symbol I held in my head of what I was drawing. And those pinecones were not brown; the hues I used were sepias and ochres and olives and umbers, warm autumn shades that pull the cool breeze out of the air and remind those standing among the scattered remains of summer that winter is just a different shade.
October 1, 2022
of curious wildlife.
It didn’t take long for me to become a paper fanatic after I started working on my art more. One sketchbook lead to three or four sketchbooks which lead to a small stack of books, pads, and bricks, each designated for a purpose or a theme or a specific style of art.

I have a hardcover sketch book just for drawing people.

I have a coiled watercolour pad just for scenes painted from photos.

I have a moleskine book I use specifically for sketching objects.

And there is definitely a canvas-bound landscape notepad reserved for travel.

A book for everything and everything in it’s right book.

So buying a new book these days often means trying to come up with a unique and specific use for it. Such as it was when I bought an 11.5x18cm Moleskine sketchbook a few weeks ago. I unwapped it. Flipped through it’s crisp 165g pages, and left it blank for a solid three weeks.

And then I stumbled on an idea.

small format painting

There is a certain satisfaction that comes with completing a full page of lines and colour and watching it transform from a blank page into a colourful scene on the page. I find myself tripped up by that though, too. Committing a long stretch of time and a whole page to anything gives me the painter’s equivalent of writer’s block, frozen over the page with a shimmering idea waiting to be realized. But as I am just learning and practice is oh-so-much-more important than generating completed art, it struck me that small format pieces, y’know, paintings that could fit on a playing card with room to spare and focusing on a subject rather than a scene, may help unclutter some of that practice. Voila, little paintings with no expectation for scene or palette or perfection. A few lines of sketch, a few daubs of wash, and then a few minutes painting in the details.

This book would not be ideal for full page art, the paper was a little thin for that, but it could definitely take a gentle few layers for a watercolour doodle or a small format painting.

My rule of thumb is literal. The goal of a small format painting is to be something that could mostly (or entirely) be covered by my thumb.

And the subjects would be varied. No need to focus on practical size. A mountain could be an interesting image painted into the size of a postage stamp a few centimeters away from a doodle of an insect filling up a similar space on the page.

The bunny was the second mini-painting in my new notebook, layered into existence over my morning coffee while the family slept in on a lazy Saturday. Not counting drying time, maybe thirty minutes of work. And a cute little guy too, if I do say so myself.
September 17, 2022
in the smokey park.
The dog wanted to sit in the grass. We’ve been riding a sine wave of temperatures through the last month or two, going from unbearably hot to jacket cool. Today the temperature swung back up to the hot again after a few days of pre-autumn chilly, and the dog, half way through our afternoon, pulled me in the shade of some big old trees in the park and plonked down in the shade in the grass.

I relented and sat down beside her. To my back, the sun was glinting through the leaves of the trees and shimmering in a romantic sort of way as if pushed through a bit of atmospheric smoke that has decended on the city from a forest fire burning a thousand kilometers away.

My camera didn’t do it justice, but then neither did my painting. That said, the shimmer of the light on the individual leaves made me consider that my rough squiggly-line trees with blotchy shadows may be dramatically improved by a few carefully chosen layers of a thousand individually coloured watercolour leaves.

Points of Colour

I can’t say if patience is truly a virtue, but there is a time to rush through the blurry colourful mess that is a huge tree and there is a time to be more patient and ask if it’s worth painting every indivual leaf. Truly, such a task cannot be accomplished in the short ninety minutes it took me to attempt such a feat, but my light to dark layering of hundreds or thousands of individual splotches over my rough wash, each splotch an attempt to convey the sense of an individual leaf on that tree, resulted in a depth and variation in the final result that seems to me more impressive than any mussy blotch of greens and yellows and shadows that I usually attempt.

Obviously, given more than a rushed ninety minute piece and proof of personal concept I may even improve upon the approach. I also suspect that more care and attention to put a more fulsome subject of focus in the piece would enliven the result dramatically. All that said, I am finding myself unable to steer directly into the headlights of abstraction as I so often set out to attempt before losing my way on that road and simply paint within the narrower confined of realistic colours and shapes.

It is a fault I hope to work towards recitifying as the months press onward.
September 11, 2022
in the garden and by the lake.
Almost a year ago to the day I found myself standing in the aisles of a local art supply story browsing the watercolour painting supplies.

This is a site about that journey. From then to now, and then on and on, forward and beyond.

I’ve painted almost a hundred pictures since that day, dabbling in colour and form and shape and style. And to be honest, most of it was mediocre.

Then suddenly, things started to click. It wasn’t revolutionary nor was it magical. It was just a year’s worth of thoughtful, deliberate learning and practice culminating in work that I wasn’t entirely embarrassed to show around. Hardly works of fine art, but definitely leaning towards competency.

And something inside me realized that to continue growing I was going to need to be a lot less scattershot in my approach. Learning and becoming better is part practice, of course, but it is also part adapting and correcting to when things go wrong and remarking upon when things go right. For example:

Wash & Layers

I bought an online course led by a sketcher and artist whose work I admire. His name is Felix Scheinberger and among other things, his explanation of the application of watercolour was the explanation that finally seemed to click in my brain about layering paints. What I took away, and what I applied in this painting was to treat the first layer of paint as a rough, diluted wash, meant to colour much (if not all) of the intended painting area with colour. Following the wash drying on the page, additional finer layers of watercolour are sparingly added to enrich the wash and enhance the details.

As I keep these notes for my sketches, posting thoughts and insights as often (or as rarely) as I create a work that I feel was a personal success and something I can learn from, ideally this becomes a collection of anecdotes and insights into my own personal learnings, helping myself grow and maybe some other random reader of these words to take some inspiration and understanding as well.

My New Friend Purple

Over the last year I've been shy about colours. By shy, I mean I've been reluctant and cautious about using colours that my brain doesn't necessarily (or literally) see in the scene. This has been to the detriment of my art, and as I befriend a new colour that is (a) very rarely, literally in nature, and yet (b) is apparently abstractly everywhere in nature, I'm finding a dramatic increase in the splendour of what I'm creating with the brush just by using it more. That colour is purple. Purple is shadows. Purple is depth. Purple is richness in the leafiness of a tree, texture in a rock, and curls of hair atop a head. In my early painting days I never used purple at all. Now, I look at the painting I've put down in the last month and I struggle to find something without it.

I took the day off a little over a week ago and, packing up my art supply bag and slinging my easel over my shoulder, I drove to a local botanical garden. I spent four hours wandering around, sitting in interesting spots, and plein air sketching-slash-watercolour painting whatever struck my fancy.

One of the gardens is a Japanese-style garden, built in consultation with cultural representatives, and stuffed with little (faux?) temples, bonsai-style trees, fish ponds and stepped stones. I planted myself on the shore of the pond a little after lunchtime and painted a scene.
September 9, 2022

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